grahamdavies.net

2048

27 Jun 2014

2048 is one of those games that give you enough of a ‘hit’ from progressing
that makes it very addictive. Developers have recently used this principle to
separate people (and parents) from their hard earned cash through games that
transition from ‘skill-based’ games to ‘payment-based’, where the only real way
to progress is to buy ‘tokens / gems’ or some other items that are abstracted
away from real money (so you are more likely to spent it without thinking about
it). These games are fairly evil in my view and have recently experienced
somewhat of a back lash (e.g. Candy Crush Saga, the recent Dungeon Keeper).

Gabriele Cirulli’s version of 2048 is a more ‘pure’ version with no in game
payments or other clutter - just the sole purpose of cleaning up numbered tiles
and getting as high a score as you can. I’ve now reached the 2048 square and
have decided to put down the ‘crack pipe’ - until the next addictive game comes
along at least.

2014-07-30: Update - it turns out that the next addictive game didn’t take very
long to appear. In fact it was a variation of 2048, called 2584, that uses the
Fibonacci sequence instead of simple matching / addition. This turns out to
be possibly even better than the original and you an even convince yourself
that you are learning something - although in fact you are of course just
throwing away your life - as one of the game’s Android developers happily
reaffirms with their name, called as they are: Time Killing Machine.